October 1944

Jan (John) Bies was born in 1904 in Slovakia and emigrated to Canada in 1927. He married Anna Huckova in Slovakia in 1932, and his wife and daughter followed him to Canada the next year.

                Just days before the accident in October 1944, local miners agreed not to exercise their right to strike during wartime, “at least as long as our working conditions were better than those of the man in the fox hole”.

(Continued in post 5 of 7)